I Tried Trump’s Media Diet. Now Nothing Surprises Me Anymore

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times/Redux

The nation is in serious danger. The creeping spread of Islam is pushing out Christianity. The country’s borders are swarming with drug-slinging criminals, and its veterans are dying in droves. Heartless, power-hungry liberals snatch guns away from poor, defenseless citizens while openly mocking Gold Star widows. Meanwhile, Democratic operatives are planning a coup from a bunker not far from the White House and wiretapping Trump administration officials, not to mention Trump Tower itself—a looming scandal of Watergate proportions.

At least, that’s what I learned spending a few weeks on a self-imposed binge of President Trump’s media diet—a virtual smorgasbord of Breitbart, Fox News, front-page newspaper headlines, presidential Twitter, and a smattering of Infowars for flavor. I already know what the president thinks of the press, but I wanted to know more about how the world looks to the president through his particular media lens. Yes, even presidents live inside their own filter bubbles. And this past weekend demonstrated just how damaging such media myopia can be when that blinkered vision belongs to the world’s most powerful person.

In less than a day, a Breitbart story accusing the Obama administration of wiretapping Trump Tower became, via tweet, a presidentially asserted fact. As with most Americans, the television Trump watches, the news he consumes, and the people he follows on social media warp and distort his view of the world.

Millions of people share Trump’s media habits. His favored outlets have huge, devoted followings. But unlike everyone else, Trump has the authority to turn these often lopsided and misleading narratives into policy—or at least 140-character proclamations that, by virtue of his office, the rest of the world must take seriously. Now the Trump administration is calling for a congressional investigation into the wiretapping claims, even though Trump aides have repeatedly failed to point to any hard evidence to back up the president’s allegations.

And I should have seen it all coming. During my weeks on the Trump media diet, I surfed an endless feedback loop circulating between Trump and his preferred media outlets, where speculation leads to justification, ad infinitum. Through this fish-eye, Trump’s wiretapping tweets don’t look surprising at all. They would instead represent the logical conclusion of what happens when the President of the United States seems to believe everything he hears—and when he limits what he hears to what he wants to hear.

The Paleo of Media Consumption

Trump’s media diet is tough to stick to. It’s like the Paleo of media consumption. It requires extra preparation to fit everything in and a spartan commitment to elimination. (Trump reportedly swore off Morning Joe after years as a devoted viewer).

Trump follows this regimen rigorously. Alone—perhaps in his bathrobe—in the pre-dawn hours, he flicks on the television to tune into Fox & Friends, which he recently called “the most honest morning show.” He scours The New York Times and the New York Post—in print, not digital—and scans The Wall Street Journal. At night he’s been known to tweet reactions to The O’Reilly Factor and Hannity and hate-tweet his response to Saturday Night Live. And don’t forget the Sunday shows.

It’s a lot to take in. So, as with any diet I’ve ever tried, I cheated a little here and there. Instead of waking up at 6 am to catch the morning shows and staying up late to watch Hannity, I caught the highlights online. And I added outlets that have a known influence on Trump. Every day I checked in on Breitbart, whose former chair Steve Bannon is now Trump’s chief strategist, and watched as Alex Jones’ face grew ever-redder throughout his four-hour Infowars broadcast. (Please know, dear reader, I did this for you.) Trump may not listen to Infowars, but several of his most controversial claims—including the idea that millions of people voted illegally—first gained traction on Jones’ show.

I also created a Twitter account to follow everyone Trump follows on Twitter, a list that notably does not include any government agencies, press secretary Sean Spicer, @WhiteHouse, or even @POTUS but which does include Apprentice producer Mark Burnett and his wife, Touched By an Angel star Roma Downey. In the dark dystopia that is Trump’s media bubble, Downey’s random musings exuded a welcome ray of light.

It’s the End of the World

Otherwise, the world inside the bubble looked bleak. On Infowars, Jones touted what he called a “bombshell” story about Hillary Clinton planting moles throughout the White House. On Fox, Sean Hannity asked Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu whether Iran was readying a “modern day holocaust.” “It’s up to us to prevent it,” Netanyahu replied in a sober baritone. Fox & Friends hosts told the story of an undocumented immigrant accused of murder in Colorado and claimed a DREAMer detained under Trump’s executive order was a gang member. Breitbart published videos of Palestinian children dancing joyfully to a song called “Pull the Trigger,” while Ann Coulter filled my Twitter feed with headlines about crimes committed by Latinos.

For the most part, these stories weren’t fabricated. But they were cherry-picked, selected to convey an overarching message about what Trump might call “American carnage.” In this world, immigration and Islam serve as the default enemies, along with the mainstream media and the left. Whenever the president comes under attack by either one, his preferred outlets offer him the ammunition he needs to fight back. When the press seized on reports that US attorney general Jeff Sessions didn’t say during his confirmation hearing that he had met with a Russian ambassador, Trump’s media mirrors scrambled to dismiss the story as hysterical.

“This whole smear campaign is really just part of the Democrat’s larger fake news conspiracy theory that Russian hacking, hacking, is the reason why Hillary Clinton lost the election,” Hannity quipped during his opening monologue.

The wiretapping story wasn’t the only one Trump ran with and repeated to millions of people across the country. After a Tucker Carlson segment on Fox about Sweden’s issues with refugees, the president held a rally in Florida, where he compared Sweden to Brussels, Paris, and Nice—all places that have experienced deadly terror attacks. More recently, the president tweeted that 122 prisoners released from Guantanamo have “returned to the battlefield,” a phony line he repeated verbatim from Fox & Friends.

I surfed an endless feedback loop where speculation leads to justification, ad infinitum.

This alternate universe to which I traveled taught me as much about my bubble as it did the president’s. I’m a 30-year-old college-educated writer living in Brooklyn, and my media diet is pretty much what you’d expect given those credentials: The New York Times, Politico, The Washington Post, CNN, WIRED (duh), and a whole lot of Refinery29 in my Facebook feed. In Trump’s filter bubble, senator John McCain is a politically motivated warmonger. In mine, he and Lindsey Graham represent the lone Republican voices standing up to a rogue president. In my bubble, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau wins over hearts and minds with his good butt and welcoming approach to refugees. In Trump’s, the “Trudeau effect” is steadily decimating trust in government among the Canadian people.

My Trump media diet reminded me that I could also benefit from breaking out of the bubble—except I’m not the president. There’s no subset of the media who make it their job to convince me I’m right. For Trump, there is.

Time and again, Trump’s pet outlets find a way to rationalize the president’s claims, even claims as apparently baseless as the wiretapping conspiracy. By Monday morning, while other outlets pressed the administration on the origins of the president’s theories, Utah representative Jason Chaffetz, chair of the House Oversight Committee, sat stiffly beside the hosts on the Fox & Friends couch, vowing to “get to the bottom of this.”

The real danger in all of this is not that Trump lacks media literacy. Indeed, he may understand the machinations of the media better than anyone. The danger is that an increasingly large number of media outlets today have built their business models around telling the president’s supporters—and the president himself—only what they want to hear. As long as that cycle exists, the wiretapping claim won’t be the last online conspiracy theory to become state-sanctioned.